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AWS Lake Formation vs Amazon Redshift comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 22, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
71
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
AWS Lake Formation
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Amazon Redshift is 7.5%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AWS Lake Formation is 5.8%, up from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Sriram-Natesan - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to create a lot of views or materialized views is beneficial
Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful. We have had to wait for at least twenty-four hours to get a call and then wait for a couple more hours for a solution. Improved connectivity to different BI tools and already published connectors for major tools in AWS could enhance the service.
Ramesh Raghavan - PeerSpot reviewer
Centralized repository, offers various cataloging mechanisms for quick data retrieval but data governance capabilities could be better
There are a couple of areas for improvement with Lake Formation. One of the main challenges, especially when dealing with rich media content, like in MarTech (Marketing Technology) or ad agencies, is its versatility. Some clients feel that Lake Formation doesn’t meet their needs and they tend to prefer competitor products for those specific use cases. The second area for improvement is in data governance. Specifically, Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance. This includes managing the entire data lineage—where the data originated, how it moves, and where it’s currently stored. The visibility of the data as it evolves is crucial, and that’s where more advanced governance capabilities would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is quite simple to use and there are no issues with creating the tables."
"The initial setup of this solution is straightforward."
"Redshift's Excel features are handy. Redshift spectrum allows you to directly query the data on an Excel sheet. Now, SQL Server also allows this, but Redshift has many more features."
"I find the most valuable features to be the MPP style of processing, which mostly all of the data warehouses provide. The ability to integrate all other AWS services, such as NSS and S3, with little effort is very helpful. The service is well maintained, there are update patches frequently."
"Amazon Redshift's performance optimization and scalability are quite helpful, providing functionalities such as scaling up and down."
"Setup is easy. It's a fast solution with machine learning features, good integration, and a good API."
"If the analyst knows SQL, which is comfortable and easy to use to go between all of these tool stacks, I think it's reliable. It's a secure and reliable data warehouse."
"For the on-premises version of Amazon Redshift, we need to start from scratch. However, with the cloud version whenever you want to deploy, you can scale up, and down, and it has a data warehousing capability. Redshift has many features."
"AWS Lake Formation lets you see all your data and tables on one screen."
"The solution is quite good at handling analytics. It's done a good job at helping us centralize them."
"I can easily move data from cold storage to regular storage."
"It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services."
"The solution has many features that are applicable to events such as audits."
"AWS Lake Formation works hand in hand with other products."
"The most important advantage in using AWS Lake Formation is its ability to connect the data lake to the other technologies in AWS. This is what I advise my clients."
"We use AWS Lake Formation typically for the data warehouse."
 

Cons

"I would like to improve the pricing and the simplicity of using this solution."
"Improvement in the immediate response and the process of getting into a call could be helpful."
"The high price of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Query compilation time needs a lot of improvement for cases where you are generating queries dynamically."
"The speed of the solution and its portability needs improvement."
"Pricing needs improvement as the solution is expensive."
"Amazon Redshift could improve the user interface support."
"Amazon Redshift does not work alone and requires integration with other AWS tools like S3 and Glue for a complete ecosystem."
"If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker."
"The solution could make improvements around orchestration and doing some automation stuff on AWS front automation. It would be useful if we could use automation to build images and use hardened images which are CIS compliant."
"In our experience what could be improved are not the support, performance or monitoring, but at a managerial level, the very expensive professional services of AWS. This could be an area of improvement for them. It's too expensive to acquire their support."
"Lake Formation could enhance its capabilities in audit logs, real-time monitoring, and advanced data governance."
"It falls short when it comes to more granular access control, such as cell-level or row-level entitlements which is a significant drawback for organizations that require precise control over who can access specific rows of data."
"AWS Lake Formation's pricing could be cheaper."
"You need to have data experience to use the product."
"For the end-users, it's not as user-friendly as it could be."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost will depend on how you set up your warehouse and what kind of data you store."
"The price of the solution is reasonable. According to the RA3 cluster particularly, it provides 128 GB of storage with only four nodes. If you can manage your computations processes with the help of materialized views and proper queries. I think the IP clusters are very useful and overall fair for the price."
"The solution has very competitive pricing."
"The product is quite expensive."
"If you want a fixed price, an to not worry about every query, but you need to manage your nodes personally, use Redshift."
"I have heard complaints about the solution’s pricing, and thus I rate it as a five."
"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven."
"AWS Lake Formation is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
What do you like most about AWS Lake Formation?
It is seamlessly integrated within the AWS ecosystem, making it straightforward to manage access patterns for AWS-native services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Lake Formation?
The pricing is expensive compared to OpenStack, but cheaper than other cloud environments. It's middle-of-the-road for regular storage yet very cost-effective when using Amazon Glacier for data.
What needs improvement with AWS Lake Formation?
If I could improve AWS Lake Formation, I would add more integrations with SageMaker. I would have built-in functions that provide statistics for the data when using the GUI, such as SageMaker Insig...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
bp, Cerner, Expedia, Finra, HESS, intuit, Kellog's, Philips, TIME, workday
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS Lake Formation vs. Amazon Redshift and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.